Charles F. Altieri

I have been primarily interested in the varieties of Twentieth Century American poetry, especially in relation to philosophy and to the visual arts. I also recently wrote a book on the affects and that shapes my thinking on most topics. But I am in transition. I have been teaching Shakespeare and Hegel and will teach the epic because I want a grand stage on which to figure out what I can say about affect in literature.I am also working on book introducing ways of thinking about modern American poetry.

Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience
Reckoning with Imagination tries to recast basic Idealist claims about imagination and purposiveness in terms provided by Witt genstein’s showing the limits of what empiricist concerns for “truth values” in relation to the range of ways we deploy the resources of language. One can use how Witt genstein contrasts display to description in order to restore much of what Hegel att ributes to expressi....

Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value
In his recent work, Charles Altieri has argued for the importance of the affects, which philosophy has too long subordinated to cognition and ethics. In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Altieri argues that critics have failed to appreciate the degree to which modernist poetry, like modernist art, breaks from the epistemology that arose from cultures of empiricism.....

The Art of 20th Century American Poetry: Modernism and After
Altieri's book situates modernist poetry in the context of early 20th century scientific and philosophical developments, to posit the emergence of a "new realism" in the works of Pound and Williams. It then traces the fate of this movement from Eliot to Ashbery by examining the way poets elaborate or revise the issue of impersonality and social identity.....